Yes, here it is!
For those who wanted to come but couldn’t make it: it rained, everybody argued, vis was 10cm and the boats all sank. You didn’t miss anything. Stop reading now.

For everyone else – wasn’t it a great weekend? The weather was just amazing, as many sun-kissed (crisped?) faces testify.

16 of us stayed in Kingskerswell’s finest caravans (extra wide versions) We managed 3 waves of diving each day – with the keenies (and two suckers to drive the boat) getting up at 3.20am on Sunday morning to hit the 5.22 slack on the Dudley Rose. Naturally quite a few tales emerged and there are a few gems. Good enough to rival Mary’s explanation of why flat fish are flat? Judge for yourselves…

Friday evening started with a good meal of Manky Chicken (recipe available on request) and fresh baked cake. Well, I say cake – Andy and Ali’s efforts at a chocolate chip sponge turned into a rather nice pair of chocolate chip cookies. Sadly the recipe for that one is not known. Probably like a sponge cake without enough egg and made using a hand whisk.

Day 1

Saturday morning we all headed for Babbacombe – the boat was already in the water in Torquay and didn’t take long to arrive at Babbacombe so wave one went out in good time. Oz and I completed our Sports Diver rescue dives and now just need SO5 to complete the open water parts of Sports Diver. This was celebrated with the firing of a cannon. Actually we didn’t have a cannon, so Luke made up for it trying to inflate Sea Moose without removing the bung from the leaky over-pressure valve. Turns out Sea Moose likes 230 millibar, not 230 bar. Still, the explosion was impressive.

Meanwhile Ali and Grainne were having a fun time with inverted Dive Leader Rescues, Andy and Penny also got a tick in the box for the permanent blob dive and Oz, penny and Andy did some lining off on the Bretagne.

There seemed to be a DSMB theme running through many of the stories. 2 out of the 3 instructors are rumoured to have sent blobs to the surface with nothing attached. I won’t embarrass them here, they worked hard all weekend with almost non-stop training. Thanks guys.

Grainne, don’t think you’re getting away either. G had a few goes at moving the shot using various methods including sending a lift bag up without the shot and launching the shot to the surface. I’m please to say that both her and Ali did successfully complete this exercise as well as their rescues. Well done to you both.

Day 2

Sunday was an early start for Craig, Luke, Paul, Andy and Ali. We were on the water for around 4.15am – it was worth fixing the nav lights after all! The bay was millpond smooth as we headed for the Dudley Rose. Paul took the camera down too. In a friendly attempt to feed breakfast to the divers on their deco stop we signalled food was on its way by sending a Jamaica ginger cake wrapper down the line, followed by lumps of cake thrown in the general direction of the DSMBs.

The sheer professionalism continued on the surface later on with a TV out-takes style radio chat: Sea Moose calls Ali up on the radio…. ”Sea Horse, this is Sea Moose, over” Ali’s response (channel 16)..”Sea Horse Sea Moose Sea Horse, this is…(trails off and lets go of button) ohhhhh….f***” ”Sea Horse, Sea Moose, Channel 67 over”… deciding that the best place for a chat would be the coastguard’s routine traffic channel…

As well as the crazy amount of training loads of fun diving was done, so thanks again to everyone who was a part of it for making it such a great weekend.

Total Dives:            62

Training dives:         16

Earliest dive:          5.20am

Cakes eaten:            3

Loose blobs collected:  3

Water Temperature:      16 degrees

Boat damaged: 1

Fisherman saved:        0